On the surface, Night is a standard Holocaust memoir, but what makes it stand out more than other Holocaust literature is Elie Wiesel's frank discussion about his loss of faith. So, while the book can be summarized as the story of a teenager who survives several concentration camps during the Holocaust, it is truly about how someone can completely lose his or her faith. Elie begins the memoir as a young man who is so religious that he voluntarily studies the Cabbalist form of Judaism in his spare time, but as he witnesses horrific incidents and loses almost every member of his family, he abandons his belief in a loving, merciful God and leans toward an Existentialist worldview.

This book is about the Holocaust and the way in which one young Jewish boy struggles to stay alive and stay sane as he lives through the ordeal of the concentration camps.

The book was written by Elie Wiesel, who is perhaps the most famous survivor of the Holocaust in the world. He went through the Holocaust himself, having been born in 1928 as a Jew in Romania. After the war, he dedicated much of his life to teaching others about the Holocaust. He wrote the book in the late 1950s as part of his attempt to make sure that no one ever forgets what happened in those years.